The court based the award on “actual usage” of the software (i.e. auditable use by uniquely identifiable users). In a real life contract negotiation, the Navy would have purchased far more licenses. Enterprises tend to buy surplus licenses so they don’t need to renegotiate and in some cases in defense deals the government actually has to buy the software for everyone, and cannot license only for specific people due to internal guidelines. This could have and should have been a lucrative deal for the german software company, instead the Navy went ahead with deploying the software widely without a legitimate license deal in place.